Letter from Havana.

Desperately Seeking Seafood

November 28, 1995|By Colin McMahon. and Colin McMahon, based in Mexico City, is the Tribune's Central America correspondent.

HAVANA — Guillermo whispers the word "seafood."

He is chatting with the owner of a paladare, a private restaurant run out of the man's home in Old Havana. They stand in from the unlighted street, Guillermo with his hand over his mouth as he talks, as though someone might be reading lips.

The men appear to be trading state secrets, betraying the revolution, maybe even dissing Fidel. But it is lobster that concerns them. Or shrimp. Scallops would be fine. The restaurant cannot sell such things unless it buys them from the government-run market. But there the fish are expensive and not particularly good anyway, while a few blocks away--where the Malecon winds along the sea--the freshest catch is available.

We want to know, Guillermo tells the man, can you help us?

This is the world of dining out in Cuba 1995.

The paladares, taken from the Spanish word for "palate," are about the only place to get a good meal. Even at the best hotels the food is bland and expensive, and you can count on one hand the good joints in Havana that do not feature home cooking.

Guillermo knows the paladares. Most of the time he is a medical technician--he operates kidney dialysis machines--but in the last year or so he has become known among foreign journalists as a good "fixer," someone who can arrange for a car, act as a guide, negotiate street deals and basically keep people out of trouble.

He's smart, honest and, as far as we know, doesn't report to the government. Working for a journalist, Guillermo can double in one day what his state job pays in a month--the equivalent of $12. And he gets meals.

The first paladare Guillermo chooses is run by a woman who was once executive chef for a top-flight Havana hotel.

The restaurant is on the second floor of an apartment building in Old Havana, in the woman's living room. The door is open and two of the three tables are occupied as we walk in. Adorning the main wall is a velvet painting of an American football player charging through space wearing a red-white-and-blue uniform. There is probably a good story there--sometimes it's hard to tell with things like that--but we never get a chance to ask. "No lobster," Guillermo says. "They're all out."

We set off through the darkened streets.

Old Havana, with its dilapidated buildings centuries old and its narrow roads, is a cool if sometimes creepy place. None of the streetlights work, there are few cars, and the sidewalks that line the crumbling buildings can be deserted. A bar pops up occasionally or a pharmacy, its shelves nearly bare, but there's no commerce to speak of. It's what a war-torn city might look like, and we compare it to the pictures we've seen of London in the 1940s or Sarajevo today.

Guillermo takes a detour to walk down an alley where a Havana artist has filled the sides of buildings with dozens of murals honoring Santeria, a folk religion that mixes Roman Catholicism and pagan beliefs. A sculpture extols the joys of pure evil, but it is dinner that calls to us.

We reach the restaurant and sit at a table in the doorway while Guillermo disappears into the back with the owner.

There are a dozen plastic chairs at four plastic tables covered with plastic tablecloths. This is the legal limit for the paladares, 12 chairs, though it has nothing to do with health or safety standards.

As the story goes, in the early days of the paladares people were packing the most popular joints, and genuine profit-making enterprises were threatening to break out.

Fidel Castro perceived this horrible development and, in a speech criticizing how far market reforms were going, said something like: "These paladares are not setting up a reasonable number of chairs, like, say, 12, but are instead bringing in 30 and 40 people."

So it shall be spoken, so it shall it be done. Twelve became the law.

We wait several minutes before the owner returns from the kitchen and asks us to follow him toward the back. We duck around a partition and he unlocks a door to another room. There a lone table is set beautifully, and the latest album from Gloria Estefan is playing softly on a cassette deck. Guillermo smiles broadly as we sit down and order some beers. The owner shuttles back and forth to the kitchen, locking and unlocking the door each time, bringing us salads and plantains and rice and beans.

For $10 a plate we order pork and shrimp and, finally, lobster tail. None of this is very kosher, we know, and so, giddy, we dig in.